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Susan SmithSusan Smith has worked as an editor and writer in the technology industry for over 16 years. As an editor she has been responsible for the launch of a number of technology trade publications, both in print and online. Currently, Susan is the Editor of GISCafe and AECCafe, as well as those sites’ newsletters and blogs. She writes on a number of topics, including but not limited to geospatial, architecture, engineering and construction. As many technologies evolve and occasionally merge, Susan finds herself uniquely situated to be able to cover diverse topics with facility. « Less

Susan SmithSusan Smith has worked as an editor and writer in the technology industry for over 16 years. As an editor she has been responsible for the launch of a number of technology trade publications, both in print and online. Currently, Susan is the Editor of GISCafe and AECCafe, as well as those sites’ … More »

In a world that is rapidly becoming less paper based and more dependent upon digital products, the introduction of a map app that copies the model of iTunes and Kindle is an appealing commodity. Avenza’s PDF Maps does just this: makes PDF maps downloadable on mobile devices to be available anywhere – while abroad, in remote areas and in the back country.

Top trends that we can expect to see dominating the geospatial landscape in 2016 are trends driven in large part by world events and climate change. Technologies play a large part in how well we will be able to manage climate change and attendant disasters, world events that include terrorism, and disease.

Autodesk CEO Carl Bass opened the mainstage presentation of Autodesk University 2015 in Las Vegas at the beginning of December by talking about how companies are “reframing” the way they think about their work. “Sometimes we have to reframe our view toward entire industries,” he said. Access to data was a big topic at the conference, as the building industry also has to grapple with the management of huge datasets, as does the geospatial industry.

Hexagon and Huawei are partnering to meet the challenges of the global city dwelling population, with all its safety and infrastructure needs. Since most people live in cities, Hexagon and Huawei see an opportunity to integrate Huawei’s communications hardware with Hexagon’s safety and infrastructure software solutions.

France will chair and host the 21st Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP21/CMP11), from 30 November to 11 December 2015. The conference is crucial because the expected outcome is a new international agreement on climate change, applicable to all, to keep global warming below 2°C, a level that would ensure safety of the planet’s fragile resources. If that level is not achieved, it could have devastating consequences on world populations and survival.

One of the challenges of the Paris agreement, where heads of state will all gather, will be to establish a periodic – ideally five-year – review mechanism to raise the ambition of each Party and progressively improve the collective effort toward keeping global warming below 2°C.

Many changes have taken place in Online GIS and geospatial course offerings over the past year, since we first covered the topic on GISCafe. The range of topics has increased to include even courses for high schoolers, and the ever popular drone classes and Geodesign. The popularity of “Massive Open Online Courses” or MOOCs allows colleges and universities to teach thousands of students at one time, at their convenience, rather than at a prescribed day and time.

At the Bentley Year In Infrastructure 2015 Conference held in London a week ago, it was noted that GIS was an integrated part of Bentley’s offerings, particularly in the utilities and assets areas of the products offerings. Products are being rolled into CONNECT Editions, which will allow users to leverage cloud services through a common modeling environment platform. Other products such as Bentley’s OpenUtilities, leverage GIS and their ContextCapture is being used to obtain a high resolution and georeferenced model of cities and even countries.